Our no-bots policy for contest promotion

What do we never do on a contest campaign?

We never touch the vote itself. Everything we do happens before a person decides whether to vote, and the decision stays with that person.

The never list

• We never use bots, scripts or any automation to cast, refresh or inflate votes.
• We never create, buy or operate fake accounts, and we never use sock puppet profiles to support an entry.
• We never use click farms, vote exchanges or paid groups that vote on request.
• We never buy or sell votes, likes, followers or engagement, for ourselves or for a client.
• We never help anyone get around a contest's protection, such as a captcha, an email confirmation, a phone code or a device limit.
• We never ask supporters to vote more often than the rules allow.

What we do instead

The full service list is on the contest marketing page.

How do we check that an audience is made of real people?

We check at three points: where the audience comes from, how it behaves after the click, and whether the entry counter agrees with our reports. None of these needs access to anything the platforms keep private.

Source

Paid reach comes from an advertising platform's own ad system, which shows you spend, impressions and clicks. For creators, we ask for the audience screens from their own analytics, such as country and age bands, and compare them with the contest's target voters before booking. Our influencer outreach service describes that review. Community and email outreach goes only to groups and lists that welcome the message.

Behaviour

Every campaign carries tracking links. Where the voting page allows it, we link visits to completed votes. Where it does not, we say so in the report instead of guessing.

Counter

We note your entry counter next to our figures each day. A jump on the counter with no matching spend, post or message from us is a flag. We report it to you and do not take credit for it.

The methodology page explains how we read these signals.

What do we say to every client before work starts?

We say it on the first call and put it in the written plan. The wording is short on purpose.

• Your entry will receive attention from people who see an ad, a creator post or a message you are entitled to send. It will not receive votes from us.
• Whether those people vote is their own choice, so we do not promise a number of votes, a ranking or a win.
• You will see a report every day, and every figure in it comes from a platform's analytics, a tracking link or the public counter.
• If anything in the campaign could embarrass you in front of the organizer, we will say so before it runs.

A test we use on every tactic

Could you show the organizer, step by step, how each vote reached your entry, and be comfortable doing it? If the answer is no, we do not run the tactic. This test also covers supporters acting on their own: we will tell you what we see, but we cannot control people outside the campaign.

Supporters who vote through your own outreach lists fall under the same rule, because every message carries the exact steps and nothing more.

What happens when a client asks for automated or purchased votes anyway?

We say no, explain why, and offer the white-hat plan instead. We do not negotiate the boundary and we do not quietly do a smaller version of it.

The sequence

• We decline the request in writing, naming the part of the policy it breaks.
• We offer a plan that works inside the rules, with ads, creative and outreach, and we show what it can realistically reach.
• If the request comes back, we end the engagement before any spend and tell you which work has and has not been done.

Why we hold the line

Organizers review unusual voting patterns, and an entry can be removed for what the organizer sees. The removal falls on your name, not ours. Our list of projects we decline names the other cases where the answer is no, such as contests whose rules ban outside promotion.

If you are unsure whether a tactic crosses the line, describe it in the free contest analysis. We read it together with the rules and tell you plainly, whether you hire us or not.